The purpose of this article is to provide a uniform, lightweight
language specification and tutorial for a class of temporal logics for reasoning
about action and change that has been developed by our group during the
period 1994-1998. The class of logics are collected under the name TAL,
an acronym for Temporal Action Logics. TAL has its origins and
inspiration in the work with Features and Fluents (FF) by Sandewall, but
has diverged from the methodology and approach through the years. We first
discuss distinctions and compatibility with FF, move on to the lightweight
language specification, and then present a tutorial in terms of an excursion
through the different parts of a relatively complex narrative defined using
TAL. We conclude with an annotated list of published work from our group.
The article tries to strike a reasonable balance between detail and readability,
making a number of simplifications regarding narrative syntax and translation
to a base logical language. Full details are available in numerous technical
reports and articles which are listed in the final section of this article.